Strength in Numbers

Short post here.

Up until a couple of days ago, the Trump administration war on immigrants and war on universities included the pulling of foreign student visas and their files on the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). There were the high profile cases like Rümeysa Öztürkf, snatched off the streets of Boston for righting a pro-Gaza op-ed in the Tufts’ student paper, and lower profile ones, like a student I know of whose status was revoked for an apparent speeding ticket.

These actions stoked the xenophobic fever dreams of Trump’s followers and anti-immigrant henchman Stephen Miller. They also are part of the attack on higher education fostered by Chris Rufo, since undergraduate foreign students are a significant revenue source via out of state tuition for public universities with ever diminishing state subsidies and also for private colleges with diminishing enrollments (foreign students from wealthier families get less financial aid). Graduate students help carry out the research that the administration is withholding to squeeze R1 universities.

Then, dramatically, the Administration reversed course, at least temporarily. SEVIS files removed will be restored for the majority of the over 4000 students affected. (Apparently those whose visas were revoked are out of luck; some have already self-deported, unfortunately.)

Why?

I suspect part of the problem for this rogue Administration is that they did not anticipate the number of lawsuits from individual students. My first response to seeing all the students getting hit was that a class action suit would be the best to lower costs for them and improve efficiency, and that by targeting individual students, the Trump administration was making this difficult.

However, well over one hundred students filed suits against the Trump administration. They did not simply self-deport meekly to their home countries. No doubt looking at that pile of lawsuits, the Trump DOJ realized that this created their own math and efficiency problem: individual lawsuits filed in multiple jurisdictions requires a LOT of civil litigation attorneys with immigration law expertise to push back. There are only 10000 attorneys total in the DOJ, and the number with relevant expertise is likely much smaller than that. They had no choice but to pull back and develop a blanket policy that is more efficient for the DOJ attorney pool.

Now you might say they could just use some of that pro bono work from private law firms to cover this. But that runs afoul of two things. First, it is not at all clear that existing federal statutes allow private attorneys to step in for the Department of Justice as noted by @passiflora.bsky.social referring to this 1982 DOJ memo (congressional authority is required for private litigators to be appointed by the Attorney General). Second, as argued here, the agreements with the private law firms are very likely unenforceable for multiple reasons.

So, ultimately, the math just does not work out for the cruel visa pulling exercised by ICE here. This is also a lesson: always push back against these vile people. The odds are that they have not really thought it all through.